


where, oh where, where are you going?

by gogollescent



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-15
Updated: 2014-05-15
Packaged: 2018-01-24 22:22:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1619090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Questions for a traveler.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where, oh where, where are you going?

"Did you see me?" Spike asked once, drunk enough to lisp. "Up there?"

His body intruded on her thoughts by unexpected routes—not only the sight of his soft skin, but a rusty stench, the creak of leather, the listening awareness that his teeth were half-unfurled: all entered her. So that even when she closed her eyes, she heard,  _thee me. Did you thee me,_ like a line from his horrible poetry, and saw his mouth’s fine blueprint, tiered fangs and awkward tongue. He wasn’t touching anything. If she focused, she could have felt his dry hair grow.

"See you trip over your duster when you were supposed to be covering my back? Last night? On patrol?" she said, after a silence.

"In heaven," said Spike. Then he put a hand to the bridge of his nose. His crisp shadow mirrored him, slyly. Black flooding the far wall. "Why the fuck did I ask that?" he said aloud, and poured out another finger of scotch.

Buffy didn’t get it. “It wasn’t some kind of happy dream, Spike. It was real. The only people there, were…”

"Dead," Spike finished for her, miming a gun to the head. "But I mean, that’s me, right? I had a soul. It’s not in a little snowglobe somewhere, not  _my_ soul. And so.”

Buffy shook her head.

"You’re sure?"

She reached up to undo her ponytail. She felt uncomfortably like she was in high school again, talking to Willow about sex with Angel. It was funny what living through it did to happiness—changed it and retouched it in primary colors, bright flat expanses, a child’s skyscape in blue and sunny yellow. Because you had been a child, comparatively, by definition. Except you weren’t supposed to outgrow the afterlife.

Total bliss, the adolescent phase.

"Can we drop this?"

"I wouldn’t have looked quite myself," Spike went on, ignoring her. "Stupid haircut, glasses—or maybe just a loose constellation of morals? What does anyone look like up there?"

The word Buffy had been groping for, when Spike interrupted, hadn’t been _dead_. The only people in Heaven were strangers. Gold-bright girls.

"Why are you asking me questions about this? Aren’t you threatening the basic foundation thingy of our special connection by pointing out how completely different my experience of death was from yours?"

"Maybe I just want to know how the old boy’s getting on," said Spike, kissing her neck. She pushed him back against the sarcophagus with a hand splayed over his face, fingers scrabbling at his concave temples, the bone plates of brow and jaw. "Oh, _Buffy,_ " he offered in a high swooning voice, "oh, please, take me now," and kicked her with military inefficiency in the chest. She let go of his face and grabbed the place his foot had connected with, gasping for breath. The crypt was clay and strange corners, things that would have been window seats if they hadn’t curved out under open ground-level grills; she braced her arm on one of the last, and caught his ankle when he began scooting toward her, legs thrust out in front of him like a boy at the top of a slide. After a brief struggle, she ended up curled on her side, folded bodily around his socked foot, while he cursed and puffed and tried to free his leg without hands—his hands being occupied in refilling his flask.

"You’re not telling me you don’t think William’s bloody soul is somewhere," he informed her, his voice steady and his eyes level with the candelabra on its high shelf. From her advantageously Freudian position she couldn’t see the flames, of course, but she knew they were there, long floating crescents of light, like a hand of long nails. Drusilla’s French manicure tipped in blood or letter wax. The red ragged edge where fire broke the skin of air. But to Spike, probably, they looked like something different. Knifepoints, or incisors, or… something less violent? Little shocks of white-blonde hair.

 _Egotism, Summers._ His voice as it sounded in her head was something different from what it was aloud: an older man’s voice, and kinder. As though he’d lived to forty rather than twenty, been a father, and after learned to lure his prey with things besides weird sex appeal. He saw, in the candlelight—what? Everything she couldn’t, looking the other way: half her tiny world remembered but not proven, except in the responsive line of his throat, the spots of light carried by his black eyes. “I think,” she said, “your soul is…” and she thought, somewhere warm. He was just a monster. But she could feel herself, in the same way absent, burning over her shoulder, and holding fast her dust.


End file.
